Death in the desert: how families are consoled when bodies are found

Scientists set up DNA scheme to identify remains of Mexicans fleeing to US

'Not forgotten' ... A marker on one of the graves of about 400 people buried in a plot in Calexico, California, that has been set aside for unidentified border-crossers from Mexico. Photograph: David McNew/Getty

The discovery of Rosa Dominguez Cano's desiccated body in southern Arizona on Christmas Day 2002 was the tragic culmination of a heartbreaking story. She died trying to cross the US border with Mexico in the hope that she could build a better life to the north for her two children. Their father had left the family and she had to borrow the money from her mother to make the crossing through the Arizona desert. Now it is the mother who has been left to bring up the girls.

Ms Cano's fate is shared by hundreds of Central and South Americans who attempt the crossing each year. But for the families left behind, not knowing what happened to relatives can be a nightmare. When the call from the US never comes, it is hard for them to find out whether their relative is still alive and if not, where they died. Around half of crossers who die are never identified.

Ms Cano's family were the first to benefit from a scheme started by a husband and wife team in the US that aimed to name the anonymous dead. It is a database about every unidentified body of an illegal immigrant found on US soil along with information from families about missing border-crossers. But the really useful information for matching bodies with the missing is a DNA profile along with biometric details.

"There are lots of families that are being left with these questions of what happened to their loved ones," said Lori Baker, a forensic scientist at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, who set up the project with her husband. "Before the database all this information was kept in these local jurisdictions ... If you didn't contact the right place, you couldn't get any information." A year after launching internationally with funding from the Mexican government, the database has identified 73 of the missing.

Ms Cano's death had a profound effect on Dr Baker. "At the time we were the same age. It was during my first pregnancy and my heart just went out to her family. It was a really difficult thing to imagine that these little girls were never going to see their mother again."

She said it brought home to her that most of the estimated million or more people who make the crossing are not criminals but desperate people. "There are a lot of people that are doing this to better their family and feel they have no other option."

Pina County, the region in which Ms Cano died, used to see a handful of deaths each year, an average of 14 in the 1990s. The average for 2000 to 2005 was 166. Along the whole border, there were 472 deaths in 2005 and preliminary data for last year suggest 500 to 600, and a quarter are children. In the last decade, the 2,000-mile US-Mexico border has proved over 10 times more deadly than the Berlin wall, and the figures are almost certainly gross underestimates.

The reason for the rise in fatalities, according to Dr Baker, is the "prevention through deterrence" measures brought in during the late 1990s by the US authorities. The aim was, among other things, to fortify the crossing points near the big cities in order to make it harder for immigrants to make the trip. "These measures tended to redirect migrants from crossing points in California and Texas in urban areas where it is safer, into areas of Arizona where it is much more inhospitable," she said.

Another problem, she said, is that because it is harder to go back and forth, fewer people are coming over for short-term work. Rather, they are coming to settle, and so are bringing whole families who are less able to make the trip.

In 2005, the Mexican government agreed to fund the database, the Sistema de Identificación de Restos y Localización de Individuos. Last month Dr Baker presented its first-year results at the meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Texas. She said there had been 2,079 requests for information from families and data from 693 sets of remains had been uploaded. Most important, 73 families have been reunited with their dead relative.

The project has moved on since Ms Cano's case, but Dr Baker remembers how scared she was of breaking the news of her death to her mother. "I was really nervous ... because it is a horrible thing to take away someone's hope ... But no, it was everything for her mother to find out what happened and have her remains sent back."